“Prague Spring” is a story that seems like it was ripped from the adult version of a Hardy Boys novel—an Italian ambassador meets and falls in love with a Czech actress leading to adventures involving stolen vehicles and the like. The story of their romance eventually leading to the birth of Willie Breeding’s wife and inspiring a track and its music video.
Today we’re premiering a new music video for the aforementioned track, “Prague Spring.” The music video is created from found footage of Breeding’s wife Klara. It feels like some sort of communist era female-centric take on The 400 Blows. It’s pretty eerie and beautiful and surprising that this was just home footage they were able to piece together and not some sort of new wave styled video. See what Willie Breeding had to say and then watch the video below:
Were you aware of the home footage of your wife in Prague prior to writing this song? It fits so well together it’s pretty eerie.
Yes and no. I’d seen it years before and remembered there was footage of Klara running around a big city where it seemed like she was alone, and it was kind of spooky. She was raised all over the world though and has hours of home footage from everywhere, so I didn’t know it was specifically from Prague (Klara is half Italian/ have Czech ). It was months after the song was done when we made the connection. I think she remembered it. Then we went through the footage and made some notes and passed it on to Casey Pierce, who put it all together.
Unfortunately, Klara’s mother, Jana, passed away when Klara was 12. So in a large sense, this video is also a tribute to her. The song being from the perspective of her Father, Enrico, looking back on these moments that happened in 1962. The beauty of the video being here’s Klara, being filmed by her father 20 years later, in 1982, in the exact same places he met Jana, running around the Charles bridge.
The track and music video are pretty reliant on memory and nostalgia which are pretty subjective in a sense. Do you think that the importance of them as tools of recollection is in their power to convey facts and stories or myths and emotions?
In regards to the song, we actually chose to write it more for emotion than facts. Though the song is based on factual events —amazing events that would better suit a novel or a movie than a song probably! I think music is powerful and tied to memory in that music takes you back to the feeling of a time. You’re not necessarily remembering every specific thing that happened, but how it made you feel overall. Which is sometimes more important, and is my favorite thing about music, and generally what I’m trying to capture when I write.
Keep up with Willie Breeding on Twitter and Facebook.
